@robinr Thank you for your very kind words. As far as what you said about finding a lawyer to sue for wrongful termination - well, there were PLENTY of attorneys who would have been more than happy to take on our case for a mere $600/hour. The question is - when do you stop paying the lawyer fees and walk away, right ? We had already sunk in $80k of our own money on the guardianship trial that we ended up losing. Then we were given an estimate for the appeal and that would have been another $50-100k. We had to pay a slander lawyer to get the articles removed from the paper and the Internet and both of the lawyers’ websites that they used as marketing collateral for furthering their law practices. My mother was charged over $200k of her money plus other “missing” money and jewelry.
And New Jersey is an “at will” state and it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to prove and collect any money from a family-owned German company. Despite my husband never having anything but great performance reviews. Believe me, we tried. And at one point we decided as a family that we had to walk away and stop the ridiculous lawyer bill expenses and just realize and accept that lawyers can pretty much get away with most anything.
But it’s becoming more and more common that even lawyers do financial exploitation of the elderly. Just in the NJ news this week:
@Anniepeepie. You hit the nail right on the head. One’s parents can move in to the house in very good physical and mental health and then WHAM the decline starts and all of a sudden that independent person is gone. For good. My mother was driving, watching my kids while we worked, sewing as a hobby, helping with laundry and doing errands. Then she became sick with empyema (not emphysema - Google empyema) and we had to nurse her back to health. She had a 60-80% loss in hearing and resisted hearing aids, lost her driver’s license due to multiple serious accidents, needed cataract surgeries and suffered from major depression. Once the dementia set in and she wasn’t sleeping much or taking care of her own personal hygiene, it became a 24/7 job for us. On top of work and kids stuff. And that caused a lot of stress and tension in our home. One can’t expect one’s parents to continue to be healthy till they pass away. It’s completely unrealistic.
My grandma lives with my parents, and I live nearby. In our situation, no one is happy. My dad’s patience has worn thin with his mother. My mom has taken on responsibilities which aren’t hers to take on (driving Grandma around, helping her with things, being her “friend”) and it has now also affected me as my grandmother relies on me to help her when my mom or Dad can’t. I am in my late 20s with a toddler and a baby on the way. I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to help with grandma’s needs beyond the occasional visit or dinner out. If you haven’t already, please think about who would be there to help your parent when you or your spouse can’t be. This will be a burden on them as well.
I hate to admit this but sometimes it is all about the money. My MIL is currently living in independent housing but it is becoming clear that she can't do that for long. She can hold a conversation with others, but is unable to make decisions even what to have at a restaurant. She says she is lonely even with people around and her hygiene care has declined. She has enough money for a year or two at nursing home but unfortunately she has sunk thousands of dollars (I'm talking over one hundred thousand) into a couple life insurance policies for her sons and grandchildren. It seems such a waste to just forego paying on those and within a couple years they will lapse...around the same time as her money runs out for nursing care. We aren't sure what Medicaid will say about the money spent on life insurance in the five year look back but they don't want you using your SS for life insurance if you claim to be in need for Medicaid. We feel trapped...do we try to have her live with us (she's a miserable person) or just accept that she basically threw her money away the last 25 years?
Potential Problems- The healthy independent senior person who moves in will inevitably age and along with that comes health problems, including needing transportation, meals, errands, social help, medical help, day to day assistance, financial help and guidance and so on. My independent strong willed mother moved in and did fine for a couple of years then BOOM started having major health issues and is now needing 24/7 complete assistance. She has gone from being fine to almost invalid stage. If you are planning or considering having a senior move in, I would suggest a back up plan or two, as well as everything legal put in writing and established
I would advise you to thoroughly look at the relationship between every person that will live in the house. If 2 of them already have a trying relationship then you can be guaranteed that it will be an issue, when you live with someone it is very hard to overlook and let it go, as it is a daily situation. You can't just get through dinner and go home. Every single family member should be on board, happily accepting the new house member and be fully aware of what caregiving for an elder looks like, as you as one person can not do this alone, no matter how incredible you are, caregiving is not a 1 man job.
If I had a loving, respectful relationship with my mom or dad I would consider it, however, neither of my parents are loving or respectful.
Whatever you decide to do, know that your lives will change and know that it is not written in stone, if it proves to be awful, change her address. You are not obligated forever if you say yes, make sure all involved know this.
One other thought, my dad is very social, so even if we had a good relationship I do not believe he could be happy in my home, to much time alone, no peer interaction and those types of things.
Let us know what you decide and keep us posted on how it is working out.
@salisbury. Thank you for your kind and sympathetic words. It truly was an ordeal that spanned from 2008 when my mother moved in with us, to 2012 when she was admitted to the geriatric psych hospital for evaluation, to the guardianship trial in 2013 and to her death in 2016. Many long months of stress and heartache. But some peace in the last year for our family, finally.
@drooney — we feel your pain and there have been MANY articles written about financial and emotional exploitation of the elderly by family, new “friends” and nursing homes in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, The Atlantic and a variety of other news publications. Our situation revolves around the lawyers who know all the loopholes. We are in discussions with AARP to publish our story and if I knew of a way to go on an investigative reporter show such as a ShameOnYou news11 or 20/20, I would do it in a heartbeat, in order to warn and help other families avoid a tragedy such as what we went through. But it takes time and patience, which we have lots of, now that we are no longer caring for my mother or our grown children.
Unfortunately financial exploitation of elders is common. It is especially easy for unethical people to take advantage of those who are confused, lonely or demented. It happened to my elderly aunt who trusted the wrong person too. He isolated her from her family and friends, monitored her phone calls and concealed her growing dementia. As she was always a very private person, the family accepted her refusing visitors and forbidding us from entering the family home. Until she died ,we never knew the extent to which her "friend" had gone to help himself to her assets. The more demented she became, the more investments he had her transfer to his name.
Wow, shiptoshore, I am devastated by your story. I am so sorry that you and your family had to go through this.
You bring up the most frightening aspect of this whole ordeal: that moment when our elders are no longer mentally capable and at the same time vulnerable to the sharks circling around them.
Even if a family does not run into sharks it can be a real trial of nerves and patience (and money!). So, Seisindb1, pay careful attention. With sharks, it is a full blown nightmare, and we are all vulnerable!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And we need a lot of LUCK in addition to good will and proper planning.
Before I got my mom into AL, the sharks were beginning to circle, and that was one reason why she had to get out of her home. But we never had such a close encounter. Pure LUCK.
So, Shiptoshore, thank you for sharing your story. I hope you and your family thrive now!!! And many thanks to your children who are giving service to our country.
The problems are not "potential" and they will occur...Some moreso than others.but be advised there will be several, perhaps many. If mom has even mild dementia, your life may well soon be that of being in prison....Pay attention to the links to articles that others have supplied.
I agree with BusyBee - please think LONG AND HARD about it. Having an aging patent move in with you is way more life changing than getting married or having a baby !! Make sure your marriage is strong and your health (both mental and physical) are excellent too before doing this. It changed OUR life forever and ours was not an impulse decision - it was well thought out and carefully planned. I just wish there was some way to share my story and help others who may be facing this.
I’m an only child and my mother was Italian-born. In Italy, it is considered shameful to the family to put a parent in a nursing home. When my father passed away in 1988, my husband and I took care of my mother (who was 64 at the time and did not have dementia yet). We moved her out of the townhouse she lived in 20 miles away that had too many stairs in it for her. My dad always had done everything for her in terms of paperwork and socializing and we were honoring a “death bed promise” to him in looking out for her. He was always concerned that she would be taken advantage of due to her naïveté. Eventually my mother needed to move close by to us and we took a second mortgage out to build her a small house in town so she could come by to watch her 3 grandchildren while we went to work. I didn’t realize the extent of the narcisistic behavior, as I’m a positive person and just thought my mother’s personality was that she was a little selfish and self-centered. When you don’t have siblings, you don’t really have anyone to bounce things off of.
However, once her dementia set in, it comes on slowly and when you’re with that person daily, you don’t realize how bad it has gotten. My mother was stubborn and drove extremely unsafely until her NJ drivers license was taken away after she totaled her car. So in 2008 we built a new house with a mother/daughter set up and moved her in and we also took care of selling her house and moving all her belongings in to our home.
This is when the nightmare really began. She had temper tantrums, started fighting with the seniors in the town senior group, made trouble on the free senior Dial-A-Ride bus, which we had arranged for her to get out. Started telling stories to others she met that we were holding her prisoner in our brand new home (remember- that we built for her convenience). My children were all grown up at this point and she would tell them she was going to kill herself and became very paranoid of everyone, even keeping a rope in her dresser drawer. At this point she had given me the proceeds of the sale of her house, since she was living with us and instead of putting it into our family account, I put it in a joint account to ease her mind if something ever happened to me. She made demands on us daily - she wanted to live in nyc in her own apartment, she wanted me to quit my job, she wanted my husband to travel less with his job, she wanted my kids to stay home with her and not go to school or away to college.
When you are in the middle of all this, you try to placate and please your parent to keep them calm and happy. But they never are. She became physical with us at times and started wandering around our suburban neighborhood aimlessly if we weren’t home or not bathe for weeks or threatening that she would “embarrass us” if she didn’t get her way or tell people she was poor (which she was not because my father retired on a full government pension). This all came to a head when she went to the hospital by ambulance, due to what she said was a stroke. The hospital could not find what was physically wrong with her. She told a psychiatrist who was called in that she was going to kill herself and burn our house down and after saying this to a few hospital staff members, they committed her to a geriatric psychiatric hospital for observation. She was there for 6 weeks and they diagnosed her as BiPolar 1 and dementia and recommended a memory care facility.
She refused all the places we searched for and finally I found a nice place that she agreed to where they would allow her sewing machine there, which sewing was the only thing that relaxed her and it was clean and bright and new. I had to take a few weeks off from work to search all over New Jersey for a place for her because my husband and I were completely unfamiliar with private pay facilities, or Veteran Aid and Attendance, etc. She of course never gave me POA but we always had joint accounts after my father died because she had no idea of how to handle paperwork due to her language difference. The end result was that the facility we chose - Paragon Village told us to not visit for a few weeks until she settled in as they could not keep someone who may try to run or wander. We obliged because we didn’t know and they told us we needed to get legal guardianship, which we started.
Instead the facility put her in touch on her second day there with an unethical Italian lawyer across the street who systematically cut the family off from her while convincing her he would not charge her any fees to fight the guardianship. He did in fact charge her over$80k but since she had dementia, she had no idea. The nursing home DOUBLED the rate of her room we contracted with them, without us even knowing during that first month. He even took her to his house for Thanksgiving two weeks after she had fallen at the nursing home and broken her hip and shoulder. It was complete brainwashing of a sick elderly woman. The guardianship trial was a year later and the slimy attorney won her case. She was deemed competent by a rogue judge and his lawyer friend was appointed her conservator. I was forced to turn over the money she GAVE me for living in our house and all savings bond gifts with my name on them over a 30 year period to her lawyer. They turned her completely against our family and we never saw her again. Her last words in the courtroom were “I never agreed with the kids being in the military, so I hope all three die in battle”. My three kids are all officers in the military and attended federal service academies so this was just devastating to hear such a terrible wish/curse. She also said that her lawyer was her new family and he promised he would destroy my family.
And that he almost did. Because he had a local reporter write a defamatory untrue arrival in the local paper that we “faked Alzheimer’s” and noted our employers names and various boards we sat on. My husband was a VP in the pharmaceutucal industry and was fired the next day after the article went viral, even tho he was not at all involved with the guardianship. Her attorney carried through her earlier threat of public embarrassment. Our close friends were in shock because they knew of ALL the years of care and sacrifice we made to accommodate my mother. We had no idea that these were traits of Narcissism and Dementia.
Fast forward to three years later and my mother went from 130 pounds to 70 pounds, had numerous unnecessary surgeries (all covered by Medicare) and died all alone, falling out of her hospital bed without rails that her new guardian (the unethical lawyer’s attorney friend became her guardian because they went before a judge without her family knowing) had not made sure she was being cared for properly. It cost my family over $120k in legal fees of our own personal finances to try and get guardianship and get the defamatory article retracted. My husband lost his job (he has an impeccable reputation in the industry) for the first time in his career and no one in our family ever saw my mother in the three years before her death. We weren’t even notified of her death by the nursing home either. Just the kind funeral director called us, even though I was next of kin. We had to prevent the slimy lawyers from attending her funeral too !! There were no other siblings or family looking to get at her money, which was given to me anyway over many years before. The corrupt nursing home and two unethical attorneys basically stole all her jewelry (which I was forced to turn over) and about 40% of her estate was completely lost.
Not to mention the psychological pain that it caused to my family. The combination of dementia, BiPolar I and Nacissism diagnosis all created the perfect storm for greedy unethical attorneys with no heart to isolate an elderly sick woman and almost destroy our family. It’s amazing we got through it and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. My mother was denied seeing her three amazing grandchildren graduate and celebrate their accomplishments. We made it through miraculously but this was definitely a case of “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” for our family.
WilmaDean—I am disabled and the emotional stress has apparently brought my maladies to a ‘perfect storm’ stage. I don’t know the results yet because I’m in that endless testing to rule out or confirm stage doctors go through. But I have a good doc.
Point being, if you, the caregiver, is already ‘delicate’, the stresses of hands on care will put you in your grave! I managed to get Mother ‘committed’ to a geri psych unit of a psych hospital to be ASSESSED for her mental functioning only. Diagnosis was moderate dementia/depression. The psychiatrist put her on an antipsychotic and antidepressant and she was stabilized. She’s now sweet and cooperative most of the time.
She and I had a talk the day before she was admitted to Geri Psych and considering that she has no short term memory it must have just been my love and concern she remembered but she was ready to go the next day. Also having my daughter close beside her the whole time helped.
One thing we had going for us when we decided assisted living was best for her situation at that time was she knew friends who’d lived in this particular ALF and had stated how much she liked it there, the care seemed good, etc. I agree with her and she went there calmly and happily.
I had some reservations about the antipsychotic drug but it’s made a world of difference! I and my daughter have to still fight my dad because he wants to take her off that drug! She’s peaceful but alert on it.
If anyone can explain to me WHY my dad objects to the drug that honestly makes Mother happier, I’d like to hear it. I feel confident dad is not far behind mom on the dementia scale, but he’s poster boy for elderly narcissistic personality disorder too!
I noticed on your profile that your Mom's health issue is diabetes, thus I assume there isn't any memory problem. If your Mom is a sweet, kind, and will do things for herself type of person then this could work out well for you both.
If I could go back in time I would have never moved in here to help her. I've lost what life I had have become so depressed can barely function or have the desire to even care for me let alone someone else! Have more health issues with myself breaking down every day more and more I need this to end!
And New Jersey is an “at will” state and it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to prove and collect any money from a family-owned German company. Despite my husband never having anything but great performance reviews. Believe me, we tried. And at one point we decided as a family that we had to walk away and stop the ridiculous lawyer bill expenses and just realize and accept that lawyers can pretty much get away with most anything.
But it’s becoming more and more common that even lawyers do financial exploitation of the elderly. Just in the NJ news this week:
nj.com/ocean/index.ssf/2018/04/attorney_indicted_on_charges_he_stole_19_million_f.html
She has enough money for a year or two at nursing home but unfortunately she has sunk thousands of dollars (I'm talking over one hundred thousand) into a couple life insurance policies for her sons and grandchildren. It seems such a waste to just forego paying on those and within a couple years they will lapse...around the same time as her money runs out for nursing care. We aren't sure what Medicaid will say about the money spent on life insurance in the five year look back but they don't want you using your SS for life insurance if you claim to be in need for Medicaid.
We feel trapped...do we try to have her live with us (she's a miserable person) or just accept that she basically threw her money away the last 25 years?
If I had a loving, respectful relationship with my mom or dad I would consider it, however, neither of my parents are loving or respectful.
Whatever you decide to do, know that your lives will change and know that it is not written in stone, if it proves to be awful, change her address. You are not obligated forever if you say yes, make sure all involved know this.
One other thought, my dad is very social, so even if we had a good relationship I do not believe he could be happy in my home, to much time alone, no peer interaction and those types of things.
Let us know what you decide and keep us posted on how it is working out.
God grant you wisdom for this decision.
I would only add, "do you have all day to hear everything that could arise?"
As she was always a very private person, the family accepted her refusing visitors and forbidding us from entering the family home. Until she died ,we never knew the extent to which her "friend" had gone to help himself to her assets. The more demented she became, the more investments he had her transfer to his name.
You bring up the most frightening aspect of this whole ordeal: that moment when our elders are no longer mentally capable and at the same time vulnerable to the sharks circling around them.
Even if a family does not run into sharks it can be a real trial of nerves and patience (and money!). So, Seisindb1, pay careful attention. With sharks, it is a full blown nightmare, and we are all vulnerable!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And we need a lot of LUCK in addition to good will and proper planning.
Before I got my mom into AL, the sharks were beginning to circle, and that was one reason why she had to get out of her home. But we never had such a close encounter. Pure LUCK.
So, Shiptoshore, thank you for sharing your story. I hope you and your family thrive now!!! And many thanks to your children who are giving service to our country.
Grace + Peace,
Bob
I’m an only child and my mother was Italian-born. In Italy, it is considered shameful to the family to put a parent in a nursing home. When my father passed away in 1988, my husband and I took care of my mother (who was 64 at the time and did not have dementia yet). We moved her out of the townhouse she lived in 20 miles away that had too many stairs in it for her. My dad always had done everything for her in terms of paperwork and socializing and we were honoring a “death bed promise” to him in looking out for her. He was always concerned that she would be taken advantage of due to her naïveté. Eventually my mother needed to move close by to us and we took a second mortgage out to build her a small house in town so she could come by to watch her 3 grandchildren while we went to work. I didn’t realize the extent of the narcisistic behavior, as I’m a positive person and just thought my mother’s personality was that she was a little selfish and self-centered. When you don’t have siblings, you don’t really have anyone to bounce things off of.
However, once her dementia set in, it comes on slowly and when you’re with that person daily, you don’t realize how bad it has gotten. My mother was stubborn and drove extremely unsafely until her NJ drivers license was taken away after she totaled her car. So in 2008 we built a new house with a mother/daughter set up and moved her in and we also took care of selling her house and moving all her belongings in to our home.
This is when the nightmare really began. She had temper tantrums, started fighting with the seniors in the town senior group, made trouble on the free senior Dial-A-Ride bus, which we had arranged for her to get out. Started telling stories to others she met that we were holding her prisoner in our brand new home (remember- that we built for her convenience). My children were all grown up at this point and she would tell them she was going to kill herself and became very paranoid of everyone, even keeping a rope in her dresser drawer. At this point she had given me the proceeds of the sale of her house, since she was living with us and instead of putting it into our family account, I put it in a joint account to ease her mind if something ever happened to me. She made demands on us daily - she wanted to live in nyc in her own apartment, she wanted me to quit my job, she wanted my husband to travel less with his job, she wanted my kids to stay home with her and not go to school or away to college.
When you are in the middle of all this, you try to placate and please your parent to keep them calm and happy. But they never are. She became physical with us at times and started wandering around our suburban neighborhood aimlessly if we weren’t home or not bathe for weeks or threatening that she would “embarrass us” if she didn’t get her way or tell people she was poor (which she was not because my father retired on a full government pension). This all came to a head when she went to the hospital by ambulance, due to what she said was a stroke. The hospital could not find what was physically wrong with her. She told a psychiatrist who was called in that she was going to kill herself and burn our house down and after saying this to a few hospital staff members, they committed her to a geriatric psychiatric hospital for observation. She was there for 6 weeks and they diagnosed her as BiPolar 1 and dementia and recommended a memory care facility.
She refused all the places we searched for and finally I found a nice place that she agreed to where they would allow her sewing machine there, which sewing was the only thing that relaxed her and it was clean and bright and new. I had to take a few weeks off from work to search all over New Jersey for a place for her because my husband and I were completely unfamiliar with private pay facilities, or Veteran Aid and Attendance, etc. She of course never gave me POA but we always had joint accounts after my father died because she had no idea of how to handle paperwork due to her language difference. The end result was that the facility we chose - Paragon Village told us to not visit for a few weeks until she settled in as they could not keep someone who may try to run or wander. We obliged because we didn’t know and they told us we needed to get legal guardianship, which we started.
Instead the facility put her in touch on her second day there with an unethical Italian lawyer across the street who systematically cut the family off from her while convincing her he would not charge her any fees to fight the guardianship. He did in fact charge her over$80k but since she had dementia, she had no idea. The nursing home DOUBLED the rate of her room we contracted with them, without us even knowing during that first month. He even took her to his house for Thanksgiving two weeks after she had fallen at the nursing home and broken her hip and shoulder. It was complete brainwashing of a sick elderly woman. The guardianship trial was a year later and the slimy attorney won her case. She was deemed competent by a rogue judge and his lawyer friend was appointed her conservator. I was forced to turn over the money she GAVE me for living in our house and all savings bond gifts with my name on them over a 30 year period to her lawyer. They turned her completely against our family and we never saw her again. Her last words in the courtroom were “I never agreed with the kids being in the military, so I hope all three die in battle”. My three kids are all officers in the military and attended federal service academies so this was just devastating to hear such a terrible wish/curse. She also said that her lawyer was her new family and he promised he would destroy my family.
And that he almost did.
Because he had a local reporter write a defamatory untrue arrival in the local paper that we “faked Alzheimer’s” and noted our employers names and various boards we sat on. My husband was a VP in the pharmaceutucal industry and was fired the next day after the article went viral, even tho he was not at all involved with the guardianship. Her attorney carried through her earlier threat of public embarrassment. Our close friends were in shock because they knew of ALL the years of care and sacrifice we made to accommodate my mother. We had no idea that these were traits of Narcissism and Dementia.
Fast forward to three years later and my mother went from 130 pounds to 70 pounds, had numerous unnecessary surgeries (all covered by Medicare) and died all alone, falling out of her hospital bed without rails that her new guardian (the unethical lawyer’s attorney friend became her guardian because they went before a judge without her family knowing) had not made sure she was being cared for properly. It cost my family over $120k in legal fees of our own personal finances to try and get guardianship and get the defamatory article retracted. My husband lost his job (he has an impeccable reputation in the industry) for the first time in his career and no one in our family ever saw my mother in the three years before her death. We weren’t even notified of her death by the nursing home either. Just the kind funeral director called us, even though I was next of kin. We had to prevent the slimy lawyers from attending her funeral too !! There were no other siblings or family looking to get at her money, which was given to me anyway over many years before. The corrupt nursing home and two unethical attorneys basically stole all her jewelry (which I was forced to turn over) and about 40% of her estate was completely lost.
Not to mention the psychological pain that it caused to my family. The combination of dementia, BiPolar I and Nacissism diagnosis all created the perfect storm for greedy unethical attorneys with no heart to isolate an elderly sick woman and almost destroy our family. It’s amazing we got through it and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. My mother was denied seeing her three amazing grandchildren graduate and celebrate their accomplishments. We made it through miraculously but this was definitely a case of “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” for our family.
Point being, if you, the caregiver, is already ‘delicate’, the stresses of hands on care will put you in your grave! I managed to get Mother ‘committed’ to a geri psych unit of a psych hospital to be ASSESSED for her mental functioning only. Diagnosis was moderate dementia/depression. The psychiatrist put her on an antipsychotic and antidepressant and she was stabilized. She’s now sweet and cooperative most of the time.
She and I had a talk the day before she was admitted to Geri Psych and considering that she has no short term memory it must have just been my love and concern she remembered but she was ready to go the next day. Also having my daughter close beside her the whole time helped.
One thing we had going for us when we decided assisted living was best for her situation at that time was she knew friends who’d lived in this particular ALF and had stated how much she liked it there, the care seemed good, etc. I agree with her and she went there calmly and happily.
I had some reservations about the antipsychotic drug but it’s made a world of difference! I and my daughter have to still fight my dad because he wants to take her off that drug! She’s peaceful but alert on it.
If anyone can explain to me WHY my dad objects to the drug that honestly makes Mother happier, I’d like to hear it. I feel confident dad is not far behind mom on the dementia scale, but he’s poster boy for elderly narcissistic personality disorder too!
Hang in there!
And here is an article on what might happen if an aging parent moves in: https://www.agingcare.com/articles/Living-with-Elderly-Parents-Do-You-Regret-the-Decision-133798.htm
I noticed on your profile that your Mom's health issue is diabetes, thus I assume there isn't any memory problem. If your Mom is a sweet, kind, and will do things for herself type of person then this could work out well for you both.
https://www.agingcare.com/questions/Blind-sided-by-what-I-think-must-be-dementia-438275.htm